By Edvarcl Heng

MOTOROLA'S newest music phone certainly looks like it could be the handset of choice for crowd surfers and music lovers.

The slick black unit has knurled logos and a high-tech, high-gloss keypad that appears as if it would crumble under rough guitar picks. It would be cosmetically suicidal to brandish it at a jam - unless it's Guitar Hero.

But for what it lacks in hardiness, the E8 makes up for in flash. Instead of a conventional keypad, it has touch-sensor controls which materialise based on the mode it's in: Alphanumeric keys during SMS and playback buttons during music playback. Motorola dubs it the ModeShift. Folks I showed it to were fairly impressed.

Yet, touch sensors are irritating (you can't really tell if you have pressed it). To recreate a sense of interaction, Motorola added localised vibration feedback. As far as virtual tactility goes, the E8's haptic feature feels real enough, even during reckless button-mashing.

To live up to its mantle as a music player, the E8 has its very own version of the iPod's Click Wheel. Motorola calls it the FastScroll touch wheel.

The "wheel" is anything but a full circle: Picture a Pacman icon instead. Where navigation is concerned, you never get to turn the wheel a full 360 degrees.

It's a design aberration to be sure and I can only imagine that it was a lawyer who put it there: "Let's not ruffle Apple's legal eagles, guys."

Also, the clunky speed of its software sometimes can't keep up with my ambitious index finger. To check exasperation, stick to the four clickable compass points on the FastScroll instead.

The quadband E8 has a dedicated 3.5mm audio jack situated on the phone top, which puts it ahead of "music phones" that work only with earphones through a proprietary jack. Audiophiles and their in-ear phones should be pleased. The E8 can also accommodate wireless stereo headphones via built-in Bluetooth and A2DP.

If you want your music louder, you are out of luck: The dedicated speaker at the back of the phone is not loud enough to irritate passengers at the other end of a bus and besides the tinny sound, there's no stereo imaging.

Sonic-wise, the E8 compares favourably with standalone MP3 players. Its amplifier is sufficient to power a pair of Bose TriPort headphones and it performs when it comes to the mids though the bass isn't tight enough. If you want to tune it, the E8 offers 11 equaliser presets, but none of them has much effect on the bass and tends to overcompensate the treble.

The 2GB of memory is plenty for most, but if you want to ramp it up, the microSD slot is inconveniently hidden behind the battery. Looping 240MB worth of MP3s yielded a battery life of 15 hours 29 minutes. On typical daily use, the E8 lasted almost two days.

FINAL SAY

If music is the be-all feature you want in a phone, the E8 has top billboard placing. For anything else, you'd better shop around.